Houk Gallery artists Elena Dorfman and Robert Polidori featured in Muse Magazine

Spring 2011

Men substituting lost wives with life-size sex dolls dressed up and experienced like the missing partners. Elena Dorfman shows us this slice of simple and quiet everyday life, on the borderline between passionate melancholy and dreadfulness.

Robert PolidoriDedicated to the Muse of MemoryBy Marta Galli and Caterina Lunghi

Ghost towns like Chernobyl and Pripyat, New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the dusty streets of L’Havana, empty apartments in the Bronx and the Palace of Versailles during its restoration. His pictures are hardly ever of people, nearly always of places. And these places are knocked-down, bleak and desolate; they are open-air sites, rooms buried in the dust with old furniture and scraped walls. Robert Polidori, like an anthropologist, captures and tells the human presence by photographing zones of exclusion and what was left behind in these dead zones. We have met with Polidori at the café of Galleria Carla Sozzani in Milan, where a few days earlier he had unveiled his “Versailles” exhibition.